#483 AP revises the NOVA tv show Decoding the Universe, Quantum
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Archimedes Plutonium
May 13, 2026, 11:06:29 PM (8 hours ago) May 13
to Plutonium Atom Universe
Saw this on PBS NOVA tonight 13May 2026, and actually learned something new from it about my recent progress in writing Advanced Logic where I say that Classical Physics is merely the Calculus in 2nd Dimension. To get physics in 3rd Dimension and the math needed to do calculus in 3rd Dimension involves Volume. In 2D the integral is area under function graph. In 3D we deal with a calculus that was unknown before. And in this show by NOVA, they discuss that a cubit in quantum computing is not just 0 and 1 digits but is a sphere in 3D. So that ties in with AP's recent discovery.
But I need to make a massive overhaul of this show for it is about 75% wrong on everything claimed. And NOVA, really those guys and gals that make this show need to stop their worship at the sphincter muscle of Einstein. I will write a book that shows Einstein is the most hyped and thus dumbest scientist of the 20th century.
I shall comment line by line in this transcript and then set up a framework for a true story of Quantum.
--- quoting NOVA, Decoding the Universe, Quantum transcript---
PREMIERED NOVEMBER 6, 2024 AT 9PM ON PBS
When we look at the world at the tiniest scales in the subatomic realm, things get weird – very weird. Welcome to the quantum universe, where particles can spin in two directions at once, observing something changes it, and something on one side of the galaxy can instantly affect something on the other, as if the space between them didn’t exist. Buckle up for a wild ride through the discoveries that proved all of this to be true and paved the way for the digital technologies we enjoy today – and the powerful quantum sensors and computers of tomorrow. Premiered November 6, 2024 at 9 pm on PBS
Correction: The original version of this film had misplaced punctuation, which falsely implied that in 1974, Stephen Hawking was the first to predict black holes. The film, captions, and transcript have been amended to clarify that in 1974, Stephen Hawking first predicted the phenomenon now known as Hawking radiation, referred to in the film as the “Achilles’ heel” of black holes.
TRANSCRIPT
Decoding the Universe: Quantum
Published: November 6, 2024
Announcer: The following NOVA program contains scenes of quantum physics,
which is known to cause confusion, anxiety, and even heartbreak.
Please see your physicist if symptoms persist.
NARRATOR: Quantum physics. It’s the science of the very small, but it punches far above its weight.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI (George Mason University): Quantum physics has not just been important, it’s been revolutionary.
NARRATOR: It’s the most successful scientific theory of the last one hundred years.
NADYA MASON (University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering): Quantum mechanics already permeates everything we do.
NARRATOR: Everything from your computer or cellphone to how we keep time depends on our understanding of the quantum world.
DAVID KAISER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): We can say now we live in a quantum age.
NARRATOR: And it’s behind one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science: gravitational waves, tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time itself.
SEAN CARROLL (Johns Hopkins University): Gravitational waves give us a whole new way to look at the universe.
NARRATOR: And yet, beyond the mathematics, quantum physics makes a shocking claim, that, at its deepest level, reality plays like a game of chance.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Probabilities are not a measure of what we don’t know. They’re just intrinsic to the quantum theory, with mind-boggling behaviors like superposition and entanglement.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: This is weird, it’s strange.
NARRATOR: What quantum physics really means remains deeply mysterious, but it’s created the world we live in today.
NADYA MASON: Quantum physics actually governs everything around us.
TARA FORTIER (National Institute of Standards and Technology): It’s not some weird outpost of physics that’s far away.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: It’s completely changed the way we used to live into the way we live now.
NARRATOR: Decoding the Universe: Quantum, right now, on NOVA.
December 12th, 1970, NASA launches a Scout B rocket from a former oil drilling platform off Kenya’s coast. Its payload is a small satellite named Uhuru, a Swahili word meaning “freedom.” Uhuru is the first space telescope dedicated to observing X-rays, high-energy light waves invisible to our eyes. Powerful sources of X-rays constantly bombard Earth, but our atmosphere blocks them.
With this groundbreaking telescope, a new vista for exploration opens. But buried in the data collected from Uhuru is something ominous.
In 1971, scientists reveal that the constellation Cygnus, “The Swan,” contains what, until then, was more of a mythical mathematical beast: a black hole.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, also the most violent.
JANNA LEVIN (Barnard College of Columbia University): Even Einstein didn’t think nature would allow such a crazy object.
NARRATOR: Black holes are fearsome monsters, capable of devouring whole planets, whole stars and even each other. A black hole is created when gravitational forces bring together enough mass to put a rip into the fabric of space-time.
DAVID KAISER: Some of them are genuinely monstrous. I mean, millions, billions, maybe even 10-billion times the mass of our own sun.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: We don’t actually have laws of physics to predict what’s going to happen to us when we go in. Hopefully, none of us will experience it any time soon.
NARRATOR: In the decades since the first sighting, science has learned a lot about these menacing and mysterious objects of destruction. They aren’t that rare.
Supermassive black holes sit at the center of most large galaxies. We have one in ours. But it turns out these cosmic behemoths also may have an Achilles heel, first predicted by Stephen Hawking in 1974. Scientists thought of a black hole as a one-way trip to oblivion, that, past its event horizon, nothing could escape. But Hawking disagreed. He theorized something did escape from these mighty giants: radiation, ironically, the end result of physics at the tiniest of scales, “quantum physics.”
Clifford Johnson is a nonfiction graphic author and also a theoretical physicist.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON (University of California, Santa Barbara): One of the key things that was discovered in quantum physics is that empty space, itself, is not empty. It’s seething with possibility.
Instead of having empty space, here, a particle and its antiparticle can appear, dance around a little bit, and then annihilate back into empty space. Now imagine that happening near a black hole horizon, which we’re told is a one way door. What if one of those particles falls in? And now the partner doesn’t have anything to annihilate with, so it will actually fly off. And a distant observer will see that particle as radiation coming from the black hole.
NARRATOR: Without consuming more matter, if it emits radiation, it will gradually shrink in size.
JANNA LEVIN: The black hole actually begins to evaporate. Now, this is a completely stunning revelation.
NARRATOR: Known as Hawking Radiation, its existence is still only a theory, but perhaps, given enough time, and it is a very, very, very long time.
DAVID KAISER: For many black holes, longer than the current age of the universe.
NARRATOR: Even a supermassive black hole, like the one at the heart of the Milky Way, may evaporate and disappear, vanquished by the quantum world and the physics of the very small.
The quantum world is often cast as “weird,” and it sure can look that way in the movies.
EVANGELINE LILLY: You’re sending a signal down to the quantum realm.
PAUL RUDD: Cassie!
KATHRYN NEWTON: Where are we?
NARRATOR: But what is quantum physics? It arose as the solution to a problem.
Science, during the 19th century, had investigated smaller and smaller amounts of matter and energy. But by the first two decades of the 20th century, the existing line between the physics of particles and the physics of waves had grown murky, especially when trying to understand the fundamental nature of light.
DAVID KAISER: Sometimes it really is important to describe light as a wave, as an extended object that sort of waves in space and travels over time, analogously to an ocean wave in the water.
Other times, as people like Albert Einstein and others began to, to find, they really, really had to describe aspects of light as if it was a collection of particles that traveled almost like miniature billiard balls.
NARRATOR: Ultimately, the answer was a new kind of physics, quantum mechanics, which included an amalgam of ideas about both particles and waves.
Its earliest formulation dates back roughly 100 years. This 1927 conference in Brussels is where the world’s leading physicists met to discuss the newly formed theory. And there was a lot to discuss, because quantum mechanics represented a radical departure from the previous paradigm of physics, what we call today, “classical physics.”
SEAN CARROLL: In classical physics, handed down by Newton, we had determinism. We had the clockwork universe.
OLIVIA LANES (IBM): So, if you throw a ball, that is a classical object with the same force, the same speed, same angle, it is always going to go to the same place, right?
SEAN CARROLL: In principle, if you knew exactly the state of the whole world all at once, and you knew the laws of physics, you could exactly predict what everything was going to do, arbitrarily, far in the future and into the past.
NARRATOR: In classical physics, even events that we think of as random aren’t really.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: There are things that appear random in our everyday lives, like rolling dice.
OLIVIA LANES: It looks random, right?
SHOHINI GHOSE (Wilfrid Laurier University): But, actually, it is a deterministic set of events which leads to whatever outcome the dice shows.
OLIVIA LANES: If I told you exactly how I was going to roll the dice or flip the coin…
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: You could predict, based on that initial throw, what the final outcome is going to be. It’s a very hard mathematical problem, but it’s not intractable. Quantum mechanically that’s not the case.
NARRATOR: Quantum mechanics tossed out the certainty of the classical clockwork universe for one that only allowed for probabilistic predictions about potential observations.
JOHN PRESKILL (California Institute of Technology): Probability in quantum physics is different, because, even if we have the most complete description that the laws of physics will allow us to have, typically, we’re unable to predict precisely what we’ll see when we observe a quantum system.
SEAN CARROLL: Quantum mechanics says we can know everything there is to know about the setup right now, and still, when we want to make a measurement of it in the future, the best we can do is say there’s a 50 percent chance of getting this outcome, 30 percent chance of that, 20 percent chance of that.
ELBA ALSONSO-MONSALVE: In the quantum theory, probabilities are not a measure of what we don’t know. They’re just intrinsic to the quantum theory. We cannot get around them. That is impossible.
NARRATOR: Some physicists, raised on determinism, had trouble accepting this new probabilistic view. Albert Einstein famously said that he didn’t believe God plays dice with the universe. But there is another related, even stranger aspect to quantum mechanics.
In classical physics, external reality is independent of the observer: looking at the moon doesn’t change the moon. And if you look away, the deterministic laws of physics continue to guide the moon on its path.
But in quantum mechanics, things are weirder.
SEAN CARROLL: The basic idea of quantum mechanics, the thing that we really struggle with, to get our heads around, even as professional physicists, is that, unlike any other version of physics, quantum mechanics separates what happens in a system when we’re not observing it from what we see when we measure it.
NARRATOR: A few rare exceptions aside, quantum mechanics says that we can’t know the position of a particle, like an electron, when we’re not observing it. At best it can only be described mathematically as a wave, its exact position given in probabilities.
But at the moment that the particle is observed, the probabilistic wave function collapses to one specific location. To the observer, who never sees this wave-like quality, it is like the particle was a particle all along.
SEAN CARROLL: That opens up a whole world of questions, you know? What happens to the observational outcomes that are not observed? What picks out which outcome is going to happen? This is still what we’re thinking about today.
NARRATOR: During that mysterious period, when the particle is considered neither here nor there, it is said to be in “superposition,” in a sense, a combination of all the possible outcomes. But what does that really mean?
SHOHINI GHOSE: Is the electron everywhere at the same time? Is it nowhere at all? Is it at one place and we just don’t know. All of those questions are actually outside of what quantum theory itself actually can answer. It’s not part of the theory at all. So, if you ask me, your guess is as good as mine. Unfortunately, that’s the best I can do.
NARRATOR: For most people, quantum mechanics remains deeply unintuitive, and yet it has proven itself again and again, by making predictions with uncanny accuracy. In practical terms, it is the most successful theory science has ever produced, and it has shaped our modern life.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: Quantum physics has not just been important, it has been revolutionary. It has completely changed the way we used to live into the way we live now.
NARRATOR: Take our sense of time: perhaps there is no better illustration of our intimate relationship with it than music and dance.
TARA FORTIER: The underlying movement of tango is reliant on the beat, which is reliant on timing, which creates synchronization. To create a truly smooth dance, it’s not enough to just be synchronized on the beat. It’s also the synchronicity between the beats that’s important. That’s the real beauty in it, in finding that connection through stretching out that second.
NARRATOR: Tara Fortier is a tango professional and a physicist deeply involved in the science of time.
TARA FORTIER: So, we have a number of systems in this lab.
NARRATOR: She works here,…
TARA FORTIER: These systems are used to characterize atomic clocks and also compare atomic clocks.
NARRATOR: …at the Boulder Colorado laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST, home to some of the atomic clocks that help set the official time for the country.
Over the centuries, we’ve tracked time a variety of ways: by the sun’s movement, the swing of pendulums, the oscillations of springs, and, in the 20th century, the vibrations of quartz crystals.
But since the 1960s, time has been officially determined using atomic clocks and the quantum characteristics of atoms.
TARA FORTIER: And the idea is that the laws of physics are unchanging, unlike something like the rotation of the earth. The rotation of the earth itself can change because of plate tectonics, because the moon is moving away from the earth. Its physics is not truly fundamental.
JUN YE (JILA/National Institute of Standards and Technology/University of Colorado Boulder): The reason why we love atomic clocks is that it is universally defined time. No matter who does the experiment, no matter where you do the experiment, in principle, once you corrected for all the systematic effects, you should produce the same time, no matter where.
NARRATOR: The consistency of atomic clocks arises from the very nature of atoms.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Atomic clocks depend, crucially, on the quantum physics of atoms. You have a nucleus, around which there are electrons in certain energy levels, and these energy levels are possible energy states that the electron can have inside the atom.
NARRATOR: Since an electron can only be at certain energy levels and not in between, to get to a higher level it needs to encounter a very specific helping hand, such as a particular photon.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: If it were to absorb an incoming photon, it would have to be of just the right energy to jump from one level to a higher level.
NARRATOR: That special relationship between the electrons of a particular atom and a photon of specific energy level is a unique signature for that atom. It’s called a “resonant frequency.”
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: So, this characteristic signature of this atom gives us a very specific frequency standard that we can use to build a time-keeping device.
NARRATOR: Atomic clocks work in different ways, but they all use a specific type of atom or molecule as a reference to lock in the frequency of an electromagnetic wave whose oscillations provide the “ticking” of the clock. Today, a second is officially defined by counting the oscillations of the primary “resonant” frequency of a cesium-133 atom. That’s over nine- billion oscillations per second. And you interact with that time reference more than you might think, for example, through the Global Positioning System, G.P.S.
G.P.S. VOICE: Turn left.
TARA FORTIER: I think that G.P.S. is actually kind of crazy when you think about it. How do we do anything before G.P.S.?
NARRATOR: The U.S.-based G.P.S. system uses over 30 dedicated orbiting satellites, each with multiple atomic clocks.
When you use the G.P.S. on your cell phone, its receiver checks the signals from four or more satellites. The signal contains information about the satellite’s position and the time it sent the signal. That time stamp is critical. Your phone uses it to calculate how long it took to receive the signal, and from that, knows the distance to the satellite.
With that information from multiple satellites, it is possible to triangulate the phone’s position within a few yards. But the whole system depends on knowing the time.
TARA FORTIER: In the end, I find it amazing, how strongly committed and tied to atomic clocks and how much we take it for granted.
JUN YE: Even though I build atomic clocks…but when I’m driving, being guided by this G.P.S. service, you don’t really become aware of how much atomic clock technology has permeated everywhere in modern life.
Have you had a chance to look at more systematically varying the V-Z?
NARRATOR: Jun Ye is a physicist with joint appointments with NIST, the University of Colorado Boulder and their joint institute, JILA.
JUN YE: What if you lock exactly on top of each other and see if that peak disappears completely.
NARRATOR: He works on the new generation of atomic clocks, known as “optical” atomic clocks. While cesium clocks use microwaves, optical clocks use lasers, which run at higher frequencies. That also means using a different atom. Instead of cesium, Jun’s work mostly uses strontium atoms, along with a laser carefully tuned to one of strontium’s resonant frequencies. It puts one of the strontium’s electrons into superposition, so it is both excited and unexcited at the same time, creating what Jun calls a “quantum pendulum.”
JUN YE: This pendulum is swinging at a speed of nearly one-million-billion cycles per second. It’s going back and forth, back and forth. And this superposition creates this quantum pendulum.
NARRATOR: And when it comes to accuracy, more swings or higher frequency equals more precision.
If you think of swings as marks on a ruler, the more marks you have, the more exactly you can measure. So, compared to a cesium clock, Jun’s strontium clock is around 100,000 times more precise. And that much sensitivity makes all the more apparent some of the stranger aspects of time, including one first predicted by Einstein, “gravitational time dilation.”
In the movie Interstellar, part of the crew of a spaceship descends in a shuttle to a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole.
When the shuttle returns, those on the mission feel they’ve only been gone for three hours, but not the crew member who remained in orbit.
ANNE HATHAWAY (as Brand, Interstellar): Hello, Rom.
DAVID GIYASI (as ROM, Interstellar: I’ve waited years.
JOSH STEWART (Voice of CASE Robot, Interstellar): It’s 23 years, four months, eight days.
NARRATOR: The difference in time is another effect of the black hole’s warping of the fabric of space-time. The warping not only means gravity gets stronger closer to the black hole, but time gets slower too. And you don’t need a black hole to be able to measure it.
Even on Earth, gravity varies, and so does time, based on the distance from the planet’s center. So, a person at the top of the Empire State Building experiences weaker gravity and time going faster than a person at street level, where gravity is stronger.
But all that happens imperceptibly. Our wristwatches just aren’t accurate enough to show the difference.
But Jun’s optical clocks are so accurate that even a small difference in elevation between two clocks will reveal a discrepancy in the passage of time.
JUN YE: When the clock changes elevation by a few hundred microns, basically size of a human hair, you will start to be able to see the time is actually running differently.
NARRATOR: With that much accuracy, a clock transforms into something more than a timepiece, it becomes a new window into the nature of the universe.
JUN YE: Making a clock is much more than just a piece to keep time. It is a sensor to explore fundamental physics, to expand our curiosity, to build new technologies that can connect to quantum computing, quantum information processing and communication.
NARRATOR: Central to making Jun’s precision atomic clocks work are ultra-stable lasers, which themselves are also a quantum technology. They date back to the 1960s.
GERT FRÖBE (As Auric Goldfinger, Goldfinger): You are looking at an industrial laser, which emits an extraordinary light not to be found in nature. I will show you.
NARRATOR: This scene from 1964’s Goldfinger is said to be one of the first popular depictions of this new cutting edge tech.
SEAN CONNERY (As James Bond, Goldfinger): I think you’ve made your point, Goldfinger. Thank you for the demonstration.
NARRATOR: Today, lasers are everywhere. There are medical lasers to correct vision; lasers at the checkout counter; lasers for cutting, communicating, entertaining cats; and, of course, for light shows, which encourage us all “to trip the light fantastic,” which may be why experimental physicist Rana Adhikari is “laser focused” on lasers.
RANA X. ADHIKARI (California Institute of Technology): When I talk about how, how beautiful the laser is as an instrument, I don’t want to gush about it too much. Like, I’m in love with lasers. I don’t know, I feel like a weirdo fanatic or something like that, but they’re just, there’s something about them.
NARRATOR: To understand what makes laser light so special, it makes sense to look at an ordinary light bulb, the old fashioned kind, with a tungsten filament. It produces light through “thermal radiation.” An electric current, passing through the filament, heats it up.
Its tungsten atoms become excited and vibrate at different speeds, which causes them to emit photons in all directions, across a variety of wavelengths. Compared to a laser, this is chaos.
RANA ADHIKARI: The way you should think about a light bulb is something like they’re just a mob of people, all singing a different pitch. So, it’s like a rock concert audience. But a laser, a laser is more like, if you go to Juilliard or Berklee School of Music, and you go to a concert, and it’s like a choir of people who have got perfect pitch, but it’s a choir of something like, a million-trillion people singing at the same time, the same tone.
CONCERT FOOTAGE: “We will, we will rock you!”
CONCERT FOOTAGE: [Choir singing, one note]
NARRATOR: That’s because laser light is generated in an entirely different way, a fact hidden in its name.
Caption
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Let’s say we have, inside an atom, an electron that’s at some excited state, some higher energy level, and now, a photon of just the right frequency passes by the atom. It triggers the atom to do something interesting. The electron loses energy and goes to a lower energy and emits a photon of precisely the same frequency as the one that came in. It’s going in the same direction and it has the same phase.
So, what we have there is a quantum mechanical amplification process.
NARRATOR: If we place a group of those same excited atoms inside a chamber with mirrors at both ends, the emitted photons will bounce back and forth, continuing to stimulate the emission of more photons, which, in turn, stimulate even more photons. One of the mirrors is only partially reflective. It allows some of the light to escape.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Now, that light is very special. It’s composed of photons that are all the same frequency, so, the same color, and they’re all the same phase, and all going in the same direction. So, you have this intense pure beam of light, and that’s the laser.
NARRATOR: Lasers have proven to be an extremely versatile tool including for measuring distance. Rana’s work with stable high frequency lasers takes that to an extreme.
RANA ADHIKARI: When you use them, you’re in a whole different realm of measurement than has to do with rulers and any of that other stuff. Anybody who is like a real pro, knows that the only thing that you ever measure is frequency. If you’re measuring anything else, you’re kind of an amateur.
NARRATOR: Thanks to the fixed speed of light, the beam of a high frequency laser has an incredibly short wavelength. Perfect for measuring extremely small changes in distance.
Since 1996, Rana has been part of a project that uses laser light to measure something incredibly, unimaginably small and weird: tiny fluctuations in the fabric of space and time itself.
RANA ADHIKARI: Space and time ripple; they’re not fixed things. And so, the distance between my two hands is not always going to be this, if I hold them steady.
NARRATOR: The idea, like so many, goes back to Einstein. In the early 20th century, his work led to the merging of space and time into one concept, “space-time.” And he theorized that gravity was the warping of that space-time fabric by the mass of objects.
But that carried a startling implication that the acceleration of objects with mass, would create ripples in space-time that spread at the speed of light, “gravitational waves.”
TIFFANY NICHOLS (Northeastern University): Gravitational waves were first predicted by Einstein, and he didn’t believe it at first. So, he went back and forth through, I believe, the mid-thirties. But his first prediction was they were too minute to ever be detected.
NARRATOR: By the 1980s, that sentiment had changed, And LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory was founded as a joint CalTech and MIT project. Part of Rana’s work at Caltech has been to continuously improve the essential art of LIGO: laser interferometry.
RANA ADHIKARI: This is the, where it all begins. I’m going to show you the whole laser interferometer. In here, that’s a prototype of the LIGO system.
NARRATOR: The basic design is easy to understand. The LIGO interferometer has two arms at right angles to each other. A very stable infrared laser feeds into a beam splitter, which directs half the beam down each arm.
RANA ADHIKARI: Half of the light goes one way and half goes the other way. And then you have mirrors at the ends and they reflect the light back.
NARRATOR: The phase of one arm of the laser is the reverse of the other. If all is normal, when recombined, they will cancel each other out, resulting in no signal. But if a gravitational wave passes through, distorting space-time, the length of each arm will change, shifting the phase of the two beams. For a brief moment, the equipment will register a signal.
RANA ADHIKARI: Instead of having exact cancellation and destructive interference, you have a little bit of light leaking out. And that little bit of light that leaks out is what we detect.
NARRATOR: But there is a key difference between Rana’s working testbed and the real deal: size.
This is one of two LIGO installations in the United States. While the arms of the Caltech instrument are about 44 yards long, the ones here cover about two-and-a-half miles each. Costing hundreds of millions of dollars, LIGO was a huge gamble on an unproven idea that paid off.
In 2015, a signal was detected. And it was a doozy.
JANNA LEVIN: The first event that LIGO detected was the most powerful event human beings had recorded since the Big Bang itself. More power came out of that collision of those two black holes than was emanated by all the stars in the universe combined. All of that power came out in the ringing of the drum of space-time.
NARRATOR: Since the original event, LIGO has confirmed the detection of more than 80 others.
It is hard to overstate the significance of the discovery.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: LIGO is massive. Albert Einstein predicted that gravitational waves should exist, and now we measure them. This is the most direct observation of black holes that we’ve ever had. This is a complete revolution in science.
NARRATOR: And it’s all possible because of that quantum technology that has become completely embedded in our lives: the laser.
RANA ADHIKARI: The more stable your laser is, the more things in the universe you can measure. And there’s no limit to it. So, every year, when we get lasers better and better, we’ll be able to see further out into the universe and see tinier things in the microscopic nature of, reality, matter, space and time, anything like that. You just have to keep working on this one tool and make it better and better.
NARRATOR: Arguably the most important change in quantum physics in recent decades is a deeper understanding of a special kind of shared state called “quantum entanglement.”
Imagine a machine that spits out pairs of coins which, on the surface, look like ordinary coins. If you flip one, it comes up heads or tails about 50 percent of the time; nothing strange there.
But, using a pair of coins fresh out of the machine, you flip one, it comes up heads, and then the other, it also comes up heads. That could just be luck.
So, then you do the same thing with another fresh pair. This time, the first coin is tails and so is the second, agreement again. So, you flip another pair and then another and another and another. Pair after pair, the two coins always agree on the first flip.
What’s going on?
Maybe the first flipped coin, once it comes up heads or tails, is somehow “telling” the other coin how to behave. To make sure that can’t happen, you separate the coins, by flying one to the moon, and flip them at the same time, so no message could possibly travel between them. Still, they come up in agreement. It all sounds too strange to be true, but particles really can behave like those coins. In quantum physics, it’s called entanglement.
DAVID KAISER: Entanglement is really just the stubborn, stubborn, exciting and or frustrating fact that takes a long time to try to get our heads around.
SHOHINI GHOSE: Entanglement is certainly the most interesting and the most confusing aspect of quantum.
DAVID AWSCHALOM (University of Chicago): It’s one of these things we don’t see, you know, naively, in the world around us, but it is taking place deep in the materials that exist around us every day.
NARRATOR: And while you probably won’t come across a coin entangler anytime soon, in the lab, scientists routinely generate pairs of entangled particles that share a quantum state so fully they can be thought of as one quantum object.
NADYA MASON: You simply can’t differentiate between them. It’s just one pure state.
DAVID AWSCHALOM: As though you have a single entity that’s spatially separated without a physical connection.
NARRATOR: Entangled particles remain connected even when they are separated by hundreds of miles and likely far more.
DAVID KAISER: So, does that mean it can go between here and Andromeda? Probably. The equations give us no reason to think it wouldn’t.
NARRATOR: Entanglement sounds bizarre. Einstein derided the idea as “spooky action at a distance.” But, since the 1970s, experiment after experiment has confirmed entanglement is a real quantum phenomenon.
DAVID KAISER: Now, of course, many, many decades later, we know that entanglement is undeniably a part of the world. It’s how the world works at the quantum mechanical level. We better get used to that and now see what can we do with it.
SHOHINI GHOSE: Because it’s powerful, let’s try to use it. It’s become this new tool.
DAVID AWSCHALOM: Being able to create and control it might be arguably thought of as one of the biggest scientific and engineering developments of the 21st century.
NARRATOR: And that’s happening on several fronts. Entanglement has been put to work in quantum cryptography and quantum communication, in atomic clocks and in continuing improvements to LIGO, but perhaps with the greatest fanfare in quantum computing.
And that starts with this, the qubit.
The qubit gets its name from its cousin in classical computing, the binary bit. Like its name suggests, a binary bit can only be set to zero or one. But from such humble beginnings much has flowed, more or less all the computing that makes up the modern world.
SHOHINI GHOSE: All the calculations, all emails, whether you’re talking to your friend or whether you are a NASA scientist doing some rocket calculation, all of that can boil down to just zeros and ones switching inside your computer, which is kind of amazing that it’s that universal.
NARRATOR: Despite its many successes, the binary bit is the equivalent of a light switch: on or off. The qubit is far more subtle.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: The special thing about a qubit is that it operates by the laws of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t have to be just in the zero state or just in the one state. It can be in a superposition of both.
NARRATOR: That superposition creates a mathematical space often represented by a sphere.
SOPHIE HERMANS (California Institute of Technology): Where classical bits can only sit on the south pole or the north pole, a quantum bit can be anywhere on the surface of the sphere.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: It opens up a whole new array of possibilities of mathematical operations.
NARRATOR: But a single qubit will only take you so far in computing.
OLIVIA LANES: One qubit, by itself, is not a computer. Or it would be the world’s smallest, most useless computer. But when you combine them, it can provide enough computation and calculations that you can get something on the other end.
NARRATOR: Using several qubits together opens up the power of entanglement and unleashes mind-boggling levels of complexity.
JOHN PRESKILL: If I wanted to give a complete description of what’s happening with just a few hundred qubits, very highly entangled with one another, I would have to write down more bits than the number of atoms in the visible universe. And it’s that extravagance of the quantum language that we wish to exploit in a quantum computer.
NARRATOR: Beyond the work being done at universities, there are almost a hundred companies developing qubits and quantum computing hardware. Major players include Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM.
Its hardware development effort is centered here, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, outside New York City.
JAY GAMBETTA (IBM): Okay, let me introduce you to our IBM Quantum System Two. Actually, inside here, is three quantum processors, and the team is working on how you investigate algorithms that use multiple different processors.
NARRATOR: IBM’s qubits employ small loops of superconducting metal. Since superconductors require cold temperatures to operate, the center section of the computer is a refrigeration unit. In fact, the cooling unit of a quantum computer can look so cool, it’s often confused for the star of the show.
OLIVIA LANES: So, this is a dilution refrigerator. A lot of people think this entire cool shiny machine here is a quantum computer, but that’s actually not the case. This is not a quantum computer. This is a quantum computer: this tiny little chip, down here.
This is a freezer, basically. But you can’t deny that it is amazing looking.
All of these other fancy shiny parts are just plumbing parts and cables designed to keep the quantum computer insanely cold. I mean, it’s like 400-something degrees Fahrenheit. Like, there’s absolute zero; we are .015 above that.
It has to be so insanely cold, because we use superconductors to make our qubits. And then, furthermore, we want to remove any type of noise or thermal excitations, which can disturb the qubits and make them behave in ways that we don’t like.
NARRATOR: Since 2016, IBM has made its Quantum Computers accessible to the public over the internet. Anyone can come up with a quantum algorithm, akin to a classical computer program, and submit it to be run.
JAY GAMBETTA: Since we first put it on the cloud, people have run over three-trillion jobs on the quantum computers.
NARRATOR: Running an algorithm on a quantum computer involves setting the initial state of the qubits and then manipulating them in a series of steps. To do that on its systems, IBM uses microwave pulses.
JAY GAMBETTA: These microwave pulses, essentially, either flip the qubit, create it in a superposition, or measure it.
NARRATOR: After all the manipulation, the qubits are read, collapsing their quantum state into either a zero or one. But there’s a catch.
OLIVIA LANES: On a quantum computer, the chip can spontaneously decay from the excited state or the one state into the zero state, when we don’t want it to. And this can occur, you know, about every millisecond or so.
These errors are basically inherent to the quantum nature of the device.
NARRATOR: Correcting these errors is one of the built-in challenges of quantum computing. The current generation of quantum computers are not yet able to do it themselves, so there’s one final step.
JAY GAMBETTA: The information then comes back out. Then it gets sent over to a computer where we do things like error mitigation, post-process the results, correct for any extra noise, and then we send it back through the cloud.
NARRATOR: It is easy to imagine that quantum computing is the next phase of classical computing, that soon you’ll see a box that says “New qubitium chip inside!”
OLIVIA LANES: The most common question people always ask me, which is, like, when will I be able to play Minecraft? When will I be able to play Doom on my quantum computer?
SOPHIE HERMANS (California Institute of Technology, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter): Quantum computers are not good for everything. In the future, there won’t be quantum PowerPoint, there won’t be quantum Word.
OLIVIA LANES: We don’t need to do that, because we have classical computers and Xboxes that are perfectly suitable for those types of applications.
NARRATOR: Quantum computers function very differently and are aimed at very different tasks. Experts see a role for quantum computers in areas like simulation of quantum behaviors in chemistry and materials, or optimization of complex systems, ranging from energy distribution to database searches.
In any case, the future of quantum computing is far from written.
SHOHINI GHOSE: So, because things are really speeding up all over the world, I think we’re going to very quickly see a demonstration of a task that’s been done with a quantum computer that just is well, well outside the capability of current computers. And that’ll probably happen within the next five to 10 years, I would say.
JAY GAMBETTA: The future of computing is going to have classical accelerators. It’s going to have A.I. accelerators, and it’s going to have quantum computing accelerators all working together. And for me, that’s one of the most exciting things, is how do we actually take advantage of all these different accelerators?
SEAN CARROLL: I think that a well-functioning quantum computer will be able to do certain things much, much faster. But number one, we don’t know for sure. And number two, it might turn out, the pessimistic view of this, that those problems are kind of limited, that they’re very, very specialized. But that’s all exciting, fun work in progress. That’s what makes it interesting.
NARRATOR: The roots of quantum physics go back 100 years. But only in recent decades have we started to gain control over the quantum realm. And that has already transformed the way we live.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: There has been astonishing change in the kinds of quantum systems we can build and manipulate.
NADYA MASON: Quantum mechanics itself already permeates everything we do. They’re part of how we manipulate the world. They’re part of every transistor and every computer.
OLIVIA LANES: It’s about how things interact on a fundamental level, but it turns out we need to know how things interact on a fundamental level to do big things, as well.
DAVID KAISER: There’s still deep mysteries to puzzle with. That part hasn’t gone away. What’s increased in a way that I still find remarkable, is that these same curious, mind-boggling quantum features are now built into how people navigate the world every single day.
NARRATOR: But what about the future? What will quantum technology offer in the coming decades?
HAKEEM OLUSEY: Just like we can tell our kids, “Oh, yeah, you know, I was born before the internet. That was born before smartphones.” Fifty years from now, people are going to be telling stories about technologies that are normal, that, today, we can’t even fathom.
DAVID AWSCHALOM: I believe, 50 years from now, people growing up won’t think twice about entanglement, superposition. I think that will be commonplace.
NADYA MASON: One of the things I love about quantum mechanics is that it seems non-intuitive to us. It tells us that, that there’s something beyond just what we think we understand. We can’t always rely on our intuition. We have to rely on our understanding to make progress. And quantum mechanics just shows us that so clearly.
When we look at the world at the tiniest scales in the subatomic realm, things get weird – very weird. Welcome to the quantum universe, where particles can spin in two directions at once, observing something changes it, and something on one side of the galaxy can instantly affect something on the other, as if the space between them didn’t exist. Buckle up for a wild ride through the discoveries that proved all of this to be true and paved the way for the digital technologies we enjoy today – and the powerful quantum sensors and computers of tomorrow. Premiered November 6, 2024 at 9 pm on PBS
Correction: The original version of this film had misplaced punctuation, which falsely implied that in 1974, Stephen Hawking was the first to predict black holes. The film, captions, and transcript have been amended to clarify that in 1974, Stephen Hawking first predicted the phenomenon now known as Hawking radiation, referred to in the film as the “Achilles’ heel” of black holes.
TRANSCRIPT
Decoding the Universe: Quantum
Published: November 6, 2024
Announcer: The following NOVA program contains scenes of quantum physics,
which is known to cause confusion, anxiety, and even heartbreak.
Please see your physicist if symptoms persist.
NARRATOR: Quantum physics. It’s the science of the very small, but it punches far above its weight.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI (George Mason University): Quantum physics has not just been important, it’s been revolutionary.
NARRATOR: It’s the most successful scientific theory of the last one hundred years.
NADYA MASON (University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering): Quantum mechanics already permeates everything we do.
NARRATOR: Everything from your computer or cellphone to how we keep time depends on our understanding of the quantum world.
DAVID KAISER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): We can say now we live in a quantum age.
NARRATOR: And it’s behind one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science: gravitational waves, tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time itself.
SEAN CARROLL (Johns Hopkins University): Gravitational waves give us a whole new way to look at the universe.
NARRATOR: And yet, beyond the mathematics, quantum physics makes a shocking claim, that, at its deepest level, reality plays like a game of chance.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Probabilities are not a measure of what we don’t know. They’re just intrinsic to the quantum theory, with mind-boggling behaviors like superposition and entanglement.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: This is weird, it’s strange.
NARRATOR: What quantum physics really means remains deeply mysterious, but it’s created the world we live in today.
NADYA MASON: Quantum physics actually governs everything around us.
TARA FORTIER (National Institute of Standards and Technology): It’s not some weird outpost of physics that’s far away.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: It’s completely changed the way we used to live into the way we live now.
NARRATOR: Decoding the Universe: Quantum, right now, on NOVA.
December 12th, 1970, NASA launches a Scout B rocket from a former oil drilling platform off Kenya’s coast. Its payload is a small satellite named Uhuru, a Swahili word meaning “freedom.” Uhuru is the first space telescope dedicated to observing X-rays, high-energy light waves invisible to our eyes. Powerful sources of X-rays constantly bombard Earth, but our atmosphere blocks them.
With this groundbreaking telescope, a new vista for exploration opens. But buried in the data collected from Uhuru is something ominous.
In 1971, scientists reveal that the constellation Cygnus, “The Swan,” contains what, until then, was more of a mythical mathematical beast: a black hole.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, also the most violent.
JANNA LEVIN (Barnard College of Columbia University): Even Einstein didn’t think nature would allow such a crazy object.
NARRATOR: Black holes are fearsome monsters, capable of devouring whole planets, whole stars and even each other. A black hole is created when gravitational forces bring together enough mass to put a rip into the fabric of space-time.
DAVID KAISER: Some of them are genuinely monstrous. I mean, millions, billions, maybe even 10-billion times the mass of our own sun.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: We don’t actually have laws of physics to predict what’s going to happen to us when we go in. Hopefully, none of us will experience it any time soon.
NARRATOR: In the decades since the first sighting, science has learned a lot about these menacing and mysterious objects of destruction. They aren’t that rare.
Supermassive black holes sit at the center of most large galaxies. We have one in ours. But it turns out these cosmic behemoths also may have an Achilles heel, first predicted by Stephen Hawking in 1974. Scientists thought of a black hole as a one-way trip to oblivion, that, past its event horizon, nothing could escape. But Hawking disagreed. He theorized something did escape from these mighty giants: radiation, ironically, the end result of physics at the tiniest of scales, “quantum physics.”
Clifford Johnson is a nonfiction graphic author and also a theoretical physicist.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON (University of California, Santa Barbara): One of the key things that was discovered in quantum physics is that empty space, itself, is not empty. It’s seething with possibility.
Instead of having empty space, here, a particle and its antiparticle can appear, dance around a little bit, and then annihilate back into empty space. Now imagine that happening near a black hole horizon, which we’re told is a one way door. What if one of those particles falls in? And now the partner doesn’t have anything to annihilate with, so it will actually fly off. And a distant observer will see that particle as radiation coming from the black hole.
NARRATOR: Without consuming more matter, if it emits radiation, it will gradually shrink in size.
JANNA LEVIN: The black hole actually begins to evaporate. Now, this is a completely stunning revelation.
NARRATOR: Known as Hawking Radiation, its existence is still only a theory, but perhaps, given enough time, and it is a very, very, very long time.
DAVID KAISER: For many black holes, longer than the current age of the universe.
NARRATOR: Even a supermassive black hole, like the one at the heart of the Milky Way, may evaporate and disappear, vanquished by the quantum world and the physics of the very small.
The quantum world is often cast as “weird,” and it sure can look that way in the movies.
EVANGELINE LILLY: You’re sending a signal down to the quantum realm.
PAUL RUDD: Cassie!
KATHRYN NEWTON: Where are we?
NARRATOR: But what is quantum physics? It arose as the solution to a problem.
Science, during the 19th century, had investigated smaller and smaller amounts of matter and energy. But by the first two decades of the 20th century, the existing line between the physics of particles and the physics of waves had grown murky, especially when trying to understand the fundamental nature of light.
DAVID KAISER: Sometimes it really is important to describe light as a wave, as an extended object that sort of waves in space and travels over time, analogously to an ocean wave in the water.
Other times, as people like Albert Einstein and others began to, to find, they really, really had to describe aspects of light as if it was a collection of particles that traveled almost like miniature billiard balls.
NARRATOR: Ultimately, the answer was a new kind of physics, quantum mechanics, which included an amalgam of ideas about both particles and waves.
Its earliest formulation dates back roughly 100 years. This 1927 conference in Brussels is where the world’s leading physicists met to discuss the newly formed theory. And there was a lot to discuss, because quantum mechanics represented a radical departure from the previous paradigm of physics, what we call today, “classical physics.”
SEAN CARROLL: In classical physics, handed down by Newton, we had determinism. We had the clockwork universe.
OLIVIA LANES (IBM): So, if you throw a ball, that is a classical object with the same force, the same speed, same angle, it is always going to go to the same place, right?
SEAN CARROLL: In principle, if you knew exactly the state of the whole world all at once, and you knew the laws of physics, you could exactly predict what everything was going to do, arbitrarily, far in the future and into the past.
NARRATOR: In classical physics, even events that we think of as random aren’t really.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: There are things that appear random in our everyday lives, like rolling dice.
OLIVIA LANES: It looks random, right?
SHOHINI GHOSE (Wilfrid Laurier University): But, actually, it is a deterministic set of events which leads to whatever outcome the dice shows.
OLIVIA LANES: If I told you exactly how I was going to roll the dice or flip the coin…
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: You could predict, based on that initial throw, what the final outcome is going to be. It’s a very hard mathematical problem, but it’s not intractable. Quantum mechanically that’s not the case.
NARRATOR: Quantum mechanics tossed out the certainty of the classical clockwork universe for one that only allowed for probabilistic predictions about potential observations.
JOHN PRESKILL (California Institute of Technology): Probability in quantum physics is different, because, even if we have the most complete description that the laws of physics will allow us to have, typically, we’re unable to predict precisely what we’ll see when we observe a quantum system.
SEAN CARROLL: Quantum mechanics says we can know everything there is to know about the setup right now, and still, when we want to make a measurement of it in the future, the best we can do is say there’s a 50 percent chance of getting this outcome, 30 percent chance of that, 20 percent chance of that.
ELBA ALSONSO-MONSALVE: In the quantum theory, probabilities are not a measure of what we don’t know. They’re just intrinsic to the quantum theory. We cannot get around them. That is impossible.
NARRATOR: Some physicists, raised on determinism, had trouble accepting this new probabilistic view. Albert Einstein famously said that he didn’t believe God plays dice with the universe. But there is another related, even stranger aspect to quantum mechanics.
In classical physics, external reality is independent of the observer: looking at the moon doesn’t change the moon. And if you look away, the deterministic laws of physics continue to guide the moon on its path.
But in quantum mechanics, things are weirder.
SEAN CARROLL: The basic idea of quantum mechanics, the thing that we really struggle with, to get our heads around, even as professional physicists, is that, unlike any other version of physics, quantum mechanics separates what happens in a system when we’re not observing it from what we see when we measure it.
NARRATOR: A few rare exceptions aside, quantum mechanics says that we can’t know the position of a particle, like an electron, when we’re not observing it. At best it can only be described mathematically as a wave, its exact position given in probabilities.
But at the moment that the particle is observed, the probabilistic wave function collapses to one specific location. To the observer, who never sees this wave-like quality, it is like the particle was a particle all along.
SEAN CARROLL: That opens up a whole world of questions, you know? What happens to the observational outcomes that are not observed? What picks out which outcome is going to happen? This is still what we’re thinking about today.
NARRATOR: During that mysterious period, when the particle is considered neither here nor there, it is said to be in “superposition,” in a sense, a combination of all the possible outcomes. But what does that really mean?
SHOHINI GHOSE: Is the electron everywhere at the same time? Is it nowhere at all? Is it at one place and we just don’t know. All of those questions are actually outside of what quantum theory itself actually can answer. It’s not part of the theory at all. So, if you ask me, your guess is as good as mine. Unfortunately, that’s the best I can do.
NARRATOR: For most people, quantum mechanics remains deeply unintuitive, and yet it has proven itself again and again, by making predictions with uncanny accuracy. In practical terms, it is the most successful theory science has ever produced, and it has shaped our modern life.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: Quantum physics has not just been important, it has been revolutionary. It has completely changed the way we used to live into the way we live now.
NARRATOR: Take our sense of time: perhaps there is no better illustration of our intimate relationship with it than music and dance.
TARA FORTIER: The underlying movement of tango is reliant on the beat, which is reliant on timing, which creates synchronization. To create a truly smooth dance, it’s not enough to just be synchronized on the beat. It’s also the synchronicity between the beats that’s important. That’s the real beauty in it, in finding that connection through stretching out that second.
NARRATOR: Tara Fortier is a tango professional and a physicist deeply involved in the science of time.
TARA FORTIER: So, we have a number of systems in this lab.
NARRATOR: She works here,…
TARA FORTIER: These systems are used to characterize atomic clocks and also compare atomic clocks.
NARRATOR: …at the Boulder Colorado laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST, home to some of the atomic clocks that help set the official time for the country.
Over the centuries, we’ve tracked time a variety of ways: by the sun’s movement, the swing of pendulums, the oscillations of springs, and, in the 20th century, the vibrations of quartz crystals.
But since the 1960s, time has been officially determined using atomic clocks and the quantum characteristics of atoms.
TARA FORTIER: And the idea is that the laws of physics are unchanging, unlike something like the rotation of the earth. The rotation of the earth itself can change because of plate tectonics, because the moon is moving away from the earth. Its physics is not truly fundamental.
JUN YE (JILA/National Institute of Standards and Technology/University of Colorado Boulder): The reason why we love atomic clocks is that it is universally defined time. No matter who does the experiment, no matter where you do the experiment, in principle, once you corrected for all the systematic effects, you should produce the same time, no matter where.
NARRATOR: The consistency of atomic clocks arises from the very nature of atoms.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Atomic clocks depend, crucially, on the quantum physics of atoms. You have a nucleus, around which there are electrons in certain energy levels, and these energy levels are possible energy states that the electron can have inside the atom.
NARRATOR: Since an electron can only be at certain energy levels and not in between, to get to a higher level it needs to encounter a very specific helping hand, such as a particular photon.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: If it were to absorb an incoming photon, it would have to be of just the right energy to jump from one level to a higher level.
NARRATOR: That special relationship between the electrons of a particular atom and a photon of specific energy level is a unique signature for that atom. It’s called a “resonant frequency.”
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: So, this characteristic signature of this atom gives us a very specific frequency standard that we can use to build a time-keeping device.
NARRATOR: Atomic clocks work in different ways, but they all use a specific type of atom or molecule as a reference to lock in the frequency of an electromagnetic wave whose oscillations provide the “ticking” of the clock. Today, a second is officially defined by counting the oscillations of the primary “resonant” frequency of a cesium-133 atom. That’s over nine- billion oscillations per second. And you interact with that time reference more than you might think, for example, through the Global Positioning System, G.P.S.
G.P.S. VOICE: Turn left.
TARA FORTIER: I think that G.P.S. is actually kind of crazy when you think about it. How do we do anything before G.P.S.?
NARRATOR: The U.S.-based G.P.S. system uses over 30 dedicated orbiting satellites, each with multiple atomic clocks.
When you use the G.P.S. on your cell phone, its receiver checks the signals from four or more satellites. The signal contains information about the satellite’s position and the time it sent the signal. That time stamp is critical. Your phone uses it to calculate how long it took to receive the signal, and from that, knows the distance to the satellite.
With that information from multiple satellites, it is possible to triangulate the phone’s position within a few yards. But the whole system depends on knowing the time.
TARA FORTIER: In the end, I find it amazing, how strongly committed and tied to atomic clocks and how much we take it for granted.
JUN YE: Even though I build atomic clocks…but when I’m driving, being guided by this G.P.S. service, you don’t really become aware of how much atomic clock technology has permeated everywhere in modern life.
Have you had a chance to look at more systematically varying the V-Z?
NARRATOR: Jun Ye is a physicist with joint appointments with NIST, the University of Colorado Boulder and their joint institute, JILA.
JUN YE: What if you lock exactly on top of each other and see if that peak disappears completely.
NARRATOR: He works on the new generation of atomic clocks, known as “optical” atomic clocks. While cesium clocks use microwaves, optical clocks use lasers, which run at higher frequencies. That also means using a different atom. Instead of cesium, Jun’s work mostly uses strontium atoms, along with a laser carefully tuned to one of strontium’s resonant frequencies. It puts one of the strontium’s electrons into superposition, so it is both excited and unexcited at the same time, creating what Jun calls a “quantum pendulum.”
JUN YE: This pendulum is swinging at a speed of nearly one-million-billion cycles per second. It’s going back and forth, back and forth. And this superposition creates this quantum pendulum.
NARRATOR: And when it comes to accuracy, more swings or higher frequency equals more precision.
If you think of swings as marks on a ruler, the more marks you have, the more exactly you can measure. So, compared to a cesium clock, Jun’s strontium clock is around 100,000 times more precise. And that much sensitivity makes all the more apparent some of the stranger aspects of time, including one first predicted by Einstein, “gravitational time dilation.”
In the movie Interstellar, part of the crew of a spaceship descends in a shuttle to a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole.
When the shuttle returns, those on the mission feel they’ve only been gone for three hours, but not the crew member who remained in orbit.
ANNE HATHAWAY (as Brand, Interstellar): Hello, Rom.
DAVID GIYASI (as ROM, Interstellar: I’ve waited years.
JOSH STEWART (Voice of CASE Robot, Interstellar): It’s 23 years, four months, eight days.
NARRATOR: The difference in time is another effect of the black hole’s warping of the fabric of space-time. The warping not only means gravity gets stronger closer to the black hole, but time gets slower too. And you don’t need a black hole to be able to measure it.
Even on Earth, gravity varies, and so does time, based on the distance from the planet’s center. So, a person at the top of the Empire State Building experiences weaker gravity and time going faster than a person at street level, where gravity is stronger.
But all that happens imperceptibly. Our wristwatches just aren’t accurate enough to show the difference.
But Jun’s optical clocks are so accurate that even a small difference in elevation between two clocks will reveal a discrepancy in the passage of time.
JUN YE: When the clock changes elevation by a few hundred microns, basically size of a human hair, you will start to be able to see the time is actually running differently.
NARRATOR: With that much accuracy, a clock transforms into something more than a timepiece, it becomes a new window into the nature of the universe.
JUN YE: Making a clock is much more than just a piece to keep time. It is a sensor to explore fundamental physics, to expand our curiosity, to build new technologies that can connect to quantum computing, quantum information processing and communication.
NARRATOR: Central to making Jun’s precision atomic clocks work are ultra-stable lasers, which themselves are also a quantum technology. They date back to the 1960s.
GERT FRÖBE (As Auric Goldfinger, Goldfinger): You are looking at an industrial laser, which emits an extraordinary light not to be found in nature. I will show you.
NARRATOR: This scene from 1964’s Goldfinger is said to be one of the first popular depictions of this new cutting edge tech.
SEAN CONNERY (As James Bond, Goldfinger): I think you’ve made your point, Goldfinger. Thank you for the demonstration.
NARRATOR: Today, lasers are everywhere. There are medical lasers to correct vision; lasers at the checkout counter; lasers for cutting, communicating, entertaining cats; and, of course, for light shows, which encourage us all “to trip the light fantastic,” which may be why experimental physicist Rana Adhikari is “laser focused” on lasers.
RANA X. ADHIKARI (California Institute of Technology): When I talk about how, how beautiful the laser is as an instrument, I don’t want to gush about it too much. Like, I’m in love with lasers. I don’t know, I feel like a weirdo fanatic or something like that, but they’re just, there’s something about them.
NARRATOR: To understand what makes laser light so special, it makes sense to look at an ordinary light bulb, the old fashioned kind, with a tungsten filament. It produces light through “thermal radiation.” An electric current, passing through the filament, heats it up.
Its tungsten atoms become excited and vibrate at different speeds, which causes them to emit photons in all directions, across a variety of wavelengths. Compared to a laser, this is chaos.
RANA ADHIKARI: The way you should think about a light bulb is something like they’re just a mob of people, all singing a different pitch. So, it’s like a rock concert audience. But a laser, a laser is more like, if you go to Juilliard or Berklee School of Music, and you go to a concert, and it’s like a choir of people who have got perfect pitch, but it’s a choir of something like, a million-trillion people singing at the same time, the same tone.
CONCERT FOOTAGE: “We will, we will rock you!”
CONCERT FOOTAGE: [Choir singing, one note]
NARRATOR: That’s because laser light is generated in an entirely different way, a fact hidden in its name.
Caption
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Let’s say we have, inside an atom, an electron that’s at some excited state, some higher energy level, and now, a photon of just the right frequency passes by the atom. It triggers the atom to do something interesting. The electron loses energy and goes to a lower energy and emits a photon of precisely the same frequency as the one that came in. It’s going in the same direction and it has the same phase.
So, what we have there is a quantum mechanical amplification process.
NARRATOR: If we place a group of those same excited atoms inside a chamber with mirrors at both ends, the emitted photons will bounce back and forth, continuing to stimulate the emission of more photons, which, in turn, stimulate even more photons. One of the mirrors is only partially reflective. It allows some of the light to escape.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Now, that light is very special. It’s composed of photons that are all the same frequency, so, the same color, and they’re all the same phase, and all going in the same direction. So, you have this intense pure beam of light, and that’s the laser.
NARRATOR: Lasers have proven to be an extremely versatile tool including for measuring distance. Rana’s work with stable high frequency lasers takes that to an extreme.
RANA ADHIKARI: When you use them, you’re in a whole different realm of measurement than has to do with rulers and any of that other stuff. Anybody who is like a real pro, knows that the only thing that you ever measure is frequency. If you’re measuring anything else, you’re kind of an amateur.
NARRATOR: Thanks to the fixed speed of light, the beam of a high frequency laser has an incredibly short wavelength. Perfect for measuring extremely small changes in distance.
Since 1996, Rana has been part of a project that uses laser light to measure something incredibly, unimaginably small and weird: tiny fluctuations in the fabric of space and time itself.
RANA ADHIKARI: Space and time ripple; they’re not fixed things. And so, the distance between my two hands is not always going to be this, if I hold them steady.
NARRATOR: The idea, like so many, goes back to Einstein. In the early 20th century, his work led to the merging of space and time into one concept, “space-time.” And he theorized that gravity was the warping of that space-time fabric by the mass of objects.
But that carried a startling implication that the acceleration of objects with mass, would create ripples in space-time that spread at the speed of light, “gravitational waves.”
TIFFANY NICHOLS (Northeastern University): Gravitational waves were first predicted by Einstein, and he didn’t believe it at first. So, he went back and forth through, I believe, the mid-thirties. But his first prediction was they were too minute to ever be detected.
NARRATOR: By the 1980s, that sentiment had changed, And LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory was founded as a joint CalTech and MIT project. Part of Rana’s work at Caltech has been to continuously improve the essential art of LIGO: laser interferometry.
RANA ADHIKARI: This is the, where it all begins. I’m going to show you the whole laser interferometer. In here, that’s a prototype of the LIGO system.
NARRATOR: The basic design is easy to understand. The LIGO interferometer has two arms at right angles to each other. A very stable infrared laser feeds into a beam splitter, which directs half the beam down each arm.
RANA ADHIKARI: Half of the light goes one way and half goes the other way. And then you have mirrors at the ends and they reflect the light back.
NARRATOR: The phase of one arm of the laser is the reverse of the other. If all is normal, when recombined, they will cancel each other out, resulting in no signal. But if a gravitational wave passes through, distorting space-time, the length of each arm will change, shifting the phase of the two beams. For a brief moment, the equipment will register a signal.
RANA ADHIKARI: Instead of having exact cancellation and destructive interference, you have a little bit of light leaking out. And that little bit of light that leaks out is what we detect.
NARRATOR: But there is a key difference between Rana’s working testbed and the real deal: size.
This is one of two LIGO installations in the United States. While the arms of the Caltech instrument are about 44 yards long, the ones here cover about two-and-a-half miles each. Costing hundreds of millions of dollars, LIGO was a huge gamble on an unproven idea that paid off.
In 2015, a signal was detected. And it was a doozy.
JANNA LEVIN: The first event that LIGO detected was the most powerful event human beings had recorded since the Big Bang itself. More power came out of that collision of those two black holes than was emanated by all the stars in the universe combined. All of that power came out in the ringing of the drum of space-time.
NARRATOR: Since the original event, LIGO has confirmed the detection of more than 80 others.
It is hard to overstate the significance of the discovery.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: LIGO is massive. Albert Einstein predicted that gravitational waves should exist, and now we measure them. This is the most direct observation of black holes that we’ve ever had. This is a complete revolution in science.
NARRATOR: And it’s all possible because of that quantum technology that has become completely embedded in our lives: the laser.
RANA ADHIKARI: The more stable your laser is, the more things in the universe you can measure. And there’s no limit to it. So, every year, when we get lasers better and better, we’ll be able to see further out into the universe and see tinier things in the microscopic nature of, reality, matter, space and time, anything like that. You just have to keep working on this one tool and make it better and better.
NARRATOR: Arguably the most important change in quantum physics in recent decades is a deeper understanding of a special kind of shared state called “quantum entanglement.”
Imagine a machine that spits out pairs of coins which, on the surface, look like ordinary coins. If you flip one, it comes up heads or tails about 50 percent of the time; nothing strange there.
But, using a pair of coins fresh out of the machine, you flip one, it comes up heads, and then the other, it also comes up heads. That could just be luck.
So, then you do the same thing with another fresh pair. This time, the first coin is tails and so is the second, agreement again. So, you flip another pair and then another and another and another. Pair after pair, the two coins always agree on the first flip.
What’s going on?
Maybe the first flipped coin, once it comes up heads or tails, is somehow “telling” the other coin how to behave. To make sure that can’t happen, you separate the coins, by flying one to the moon, and flip them at the same time, so no message could possibly travel between them. Still, they come up in agreement. It all sounds too strange to be true, but particles really can behave like those coins. In quantum physics, it’s called entanglement.
DAVID KAISER: Entanglement is really just the stubborn, stubborn, exciting and or frustrating fact that takes a long time to try to get our heads around.
SHOHINI GHOSE: Entanglement is certainly the most interesting and the most confusing aspect of quantum.
DAVID AWSCHALOM (University of Chicago): It’s one of these things we don’t see, you know, naively, in the world around us, but it is taking place deep in the materials that exist around us every day.
NARRATOR: And while you probably won’t come across a coin entangler anytime soon, in the lab, scientists routinely generate pairs of entangled particles that share a quantum state so fully they can be thought of as one quantum object.
NADYA MASON: You simply can’t differentiate between them. It’s just one pure state.
DAVID AWSCHALOM: As though you have a single entity that’s spatially separated without a physical connection.
NARRATOR: Entangled particles remain connected even when they are separated by hundreds of miles and likely far more.
DAVID KAISER: So, does that mean it can go between here and Andromeda? Probably. The equations give us no reason to think it wouldn’t.
NARRATOR: Entanglement sounds bizarre. Einstein derided the idea as “spooky action at a distance.” But, since the 1970s, experiment after experiment has confirmed entanglement is a real quantum phenomenon.
DAVID KAISER: Now, of course, many, many decades later, we know that entanglement is undeniably a part of the world. It’s how the world works at the quantum mechanical level. We better get used to that and now see what can we do with it.
SHOHINI GHOSE: Because it’s powerful, let’s try to use it. It’s become this new tool.
DAVID AWSCHALOM: Being able to create and control it might be arguably thought of as one of the biggest scientific and engineering developments of the 21st century.
NARRATOR: And that’s happening on several fronts. Entanglement has been put to work in quantum cryptography and quantum communication, in atomic clocks and in continuing improvements to LIGO, but perhaps with the greatest fanfare in quantum computing.
And that starts with this, the qubit.
The qubit gets its name from its cousin in classical computing, the binary bit. Like its name suggests, a binary bit can only be set to zero or one. But from such humble beginnings much has flowed, more or less all the computing that makes up the modern world.
SHOHINI GHOSE: All the calculations, all emails, whether you’re talking to your friend or whether you are a NASA scientist doing some rocket calculation, all of that can boil down to just zeros and ones switching inside your computer, which is kind of amazing that it’s that universal.
NARRATOR: Despite its many successes, the binary bit is the equivalent of a light switch: on or off. The qubit is far more subtle.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: The special thing about a qubit is that it operates by the laws of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t have to be just in the zero state or just in the one state. It can be in a superposition of both.
NARRATOR: That superposition creates a mathematical space often represented by a sphere.
SOPHIE HERMANS (California Institute of Technology): Where classical bits can only sit on the south pole or the north pole, a quantum bit can be anywhere on the surface of the sphere.
ELBA ALONSO-MONSALVE: It opens up a whole new array of possibilities of mathematical operations.
NARRATOR: But a single qubit will only take you so far in computing.
OLIVIA LANES: One qubit, by itself, is not a computer. Or it would be the world’s smallest, most useless computer. But when you combine them, it can provide enough computation and calculations that you can get something on the other end.
NARRATOR: Using several qubits together opens up the power of entanglement and unleashes mind-boggling levels of complexity.
JOHN PRESKILL: If I wanted to give a complete description of what’s happening with just a few hundred qubits, very highly entangled with one another, I would have to write down more bits than the number of atoms in the visible universe. And it’s that extravagance of the quantum language that we wish to exploit in a quantum computer.
NARRATOR: Beyond the work being done at universities, there are almost a hundred companies developing qubits and quantum computing hardware. Major players include Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM.
Its hardware development effort is centered here, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, outside New York City.
JAY GAMBETTA (IBM): Okay, let me introduce you to our IBM Quantum System Two. Actually, inside here, is three quantum processors, and the team is working on how you investigate algorithms that use multiple different processors.
NARRATOR: IBM’s qubits employ small loops of superconducting metal. Since superconductors require cold temperatures to operate, the center section of the computer is a refrigeration unit. In fact, the cooling unit of a quantum computer can look so cool, it’s often confused for the star of the show.
OLIVIA LANES: So, this is a dilution refrigerator. A lot of people think this entire cool shiny machine here is a quantum computer, but that’s actually not the case. This is not a quantum computer. This is a quantum computer: this tiny little chip, down here.
This is a freezer, basically. But you can’t deny that it is amazing looking.
All of these other fancy shiny parts are just plumbing parts and cables designed to keep the quantum computer insanely cold. I mean, it’s like 400-something degrees Fahrenheit. Like, there’s absolute zero; we are .015 above that.
It has to be so insanely cold, because we use superconductors to make our qubits. And then, furthermore, we want to remove any type of noise or thermal excitations, which can disturb the qubits and make them behave in ways that we don’t like.
NARRATOR: Since 2016, IBM has made its Quantum Computers accessible to the public over the internet. Anyone can come up with a quantum algorithm, akin to a classical computer program, and submit it to be run.
JAY GAMBETTA: Since we first put it on the cloud, people have run over three-trillion jobs on the quantum computers.
NARRATOR: Running an algorithm on a quantum computer involves setting the initial state of the qubits and then manipulating them in a series of steps. To do that on its systems, IBM uses microwave pulses.
JAY GAMBETTA: These microwave pulses, essentially, either flip the qubit, create it in a superposition, or measure it.
NARRATOR: After all the manipulation, the qubits are read, collapsing their quantum state into either a zero or one. But there’s a catch.
OLIVIA LANES: On a quantum computer, the chip can spontaneously decay from the excited state or the one state into the zero state, when we don’t want it to. And this can occur, you know, about every millisecond or so.
These errors are basically inherent to the quantum nature of the device.
NARRATOR: Correcting these errors is one of the built-in challenges of quantum computing. The current generation of quantum computers are not yet able to do it themselves, so there’s one final step.
JAY GAMBETTA: The information then comes back out. Then it gets sent over to a computer where we do things like error mitigation, post-process the results, correct for any extra noise, and then we send it back through the cloud.
NARRATOR: It is easy to imagine that quantum computing is the next phase of classical computing, that soon you’ll see a box that says “New qubitium chip inside!”
OLIVIA LANES: The most common question people always ask me, which is, like, when will I be able to play Minecraft? When will I be able to play Doom on my quantum computer?
SOPHIE HERMANS (California Institute of Technology, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter): Quantum computers are not good for everything. In the future, there won’t be quantum PowerPoint, there won’t be quantum Word.
OLIVIA LANES: We don’t need to do that, because we have classical computers and Xboxes that are perfectly suitable for those types of applications.
NARRATOR: Quantum computers function very differently and are aimed at very different tasks. Experts see a role for quantum computers in areas like simulation of quantum behaviors in chemistry and materials, or optimization of complex systems, ranging from energy distribution to database searches.
In any case, the future of quantum computing is far from written.
SHOHINI GHOSE: So, because things are really speeding up all over the world, I think we’re going to very quickly see a demonstration of a task that’s been done with a quantum computer that just is well, well outside the capability of current computers. And that’ll probably happen within the next five to 10 years, I would say.
JAY GAMBETTA: The future of computing is going to have classical accelerators. It’s going to have A.I. accelerators, and it’s going to have quantum computing accelerators all working together. And for me, that’s one of the most exciting things, is how do we actually take advantage of all these different accelerators?
SEAN CARROLL: I think that a well-functioning quantum computer will be able to do certain things much, much faster. But number one, we don’t know for sure. And number two, it might turn out, the pessimistic view of this, that those problems are kind of limited, that they’re very, very specialized. But that’s all exciting, fun work in progress. That’s what makes it interesting.
NARRATOR: The roots of quantum physics go back 100 years. But only in recent decades have we started to gain control over the quantum realm. And that has already transformed the way we live.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: There has been astonishing change in the kinds of quantum systems we can build and manipulate.
NADYA MASON: Quantum mechanics itself already permeates everything we do. They’re part of how we manipulate the world. They’re part of every transistor and every computer.
OLIVIA LANES: It’s about how things interact on a fundamental level, but it turns out we need to know how things interact on a fundamental level to do big things, as well.
DAVID KAISER: There’s still deep mysteries to puzzle with. That part hasn’t gone away. What’s increased in a way that I still find remarkable, is that these same curious, mind-boggling quantum features are now built into how people navigate the world every single day.
NARRATOR: But what about the future? What will quantum technology offer in the coming decades?
HAKEEM OLUSEY: Just like we can tell our kids, “Oh, yeah, you know, I was born before the internet. That was born before smartphones.” Fifty years from now, people are going to be telling stories about technologies that are normal, that, today, we can’t even fathom.
DAVID AWSCHALOM: I believe, 50 years from now, people growing up won’t think twice about entanglement, superposition. I think that will be commonplace.
NADYA MASON: One of the things I love about quantum mechanics is that it seems non-intuitive to us. It tells us that, that there’s something beyond just what we think we understand. We can’t always rely on our intuition. We have to rely on our understanding to make progress. And quantum mechanics just shows us that so clearly.
--- end quoting NOVA transcript Decoding the Universe, Quantum---
Archimedes Plutonium
5:08 AM (2 hours ago) 5:08 AM
to Plutonium Atom Universe
Well, first off, the show should start with what Quantum Mechanics means. It means "discrete" and not a continuum. Max Planck should have been mentioned first of all scientists as starting quantum mechanics in year 1900. Quantum means discrete and so no continuum in physics. This is hugely important for mathematics also, in that the math community was ignorant in 1900 with their Reals which are a continuum of numbers, holes or gaps from one number to the next number. But in math, if the numbers have no holes in them and are continuous, then math cannot have a Calculus at all. The Calculus, especially the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus cannot exist without discrete numbers. The Decimal 10 Grid is this 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, . . . 9.8, 9.9, 10.0. You see from 1 to the next number in 10 Grid is 1.1, then the next number is 1.2, with no numbers in between.
Calculus to exist demands the numbers be discrete, but math professors have been direlect and stupid ever since Max Planck discovered that numbers in physics of physical existence be discrete and no continuum.
And this makes sense in that the interior of Atoms is mostly empty space. Even the Light-photon is mostly empty space as a traveling pulse in space.
So, the start of any show on the history of Quantum Mechanics must start with 1900 Max Planck finds that Physics is discrete, and mathematicians are stupid and slow and only after 2013 does mathematics follow suit with physics from AP's Teaching True Calculus books.
After talking about "discrete", the very next feature to talk about Quantum Mechanics was only recently discovered by AP, in fact in Spring of 2026 while AP was doing 4 logic textbooks. A beautiful discovery which seemed to fall in place.
Old Physics had the obnoxious tendency of thinking that Classical Physics was bad and a approximation of Quantum Mechanics, QM. That QM took over all of physics. And that only QM was correct.
What AP found in Spring of 2026 was something worked out in past decades, where AP was looking for a 3rd dimension Calculus. Have you ever realized that the Calculus of Old Math along with Old Physics is really all in 2D. For the integral is area under the function graph, and the derivative is dy/dx, purely 2nd dimension. Everyone who takes and passes calculus in their education should have realized that calculus in 3rd dimension is, ... well, .... unknown.
Now the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division care less what dimension they perform in. But the Calculus is purely a 2D phenomenon. There is no derivative of a dy, dx and dz, nor is there a concept of area under the function graph for 3D as integral.
So, what is this brilliant discovery AP makes in Spring of 2026, and which would become the SECOND most important feature of Quantum Mechanics after that of being DISCRETE????
This brilliant discovery is the idea of what I call a DIMENSION SHIFT.
The difference between Classical Physics is that it is confined to 2D, while Quantum Mechanics is in 3D. Not that Classical Physics is wrong--- no way. It is all correct for 2D Space. Quantum Mechanics however is physics in 3rd dimension and the mathematics needed for QM is different than the 2D calculus.
We are starting to see this different mathematics in quantum computing where we get away from gate open and gate closed of 1 and 0 digits to describe anything. In quantum computing as this NOVA show displays, is a 3D sphere where the north pole is 1 and south pole is 0, but you have all the decimal grid numbers in between.
The New Mathematics of 3D Calculus is really not all that new. No, we have been using it since Ancient Greek time. It is simply for the integral the Volume. And the volume is composed of plates-of-area. The volume of rectangular box is plates of width x depth multiply by length. The width x depth is the calculus of 2D. For calculus of 3D we multiply by length. Same goes for volume of cylinder, multiply circle area by height of cylinder.
The derivative in 3D is a bit more complicated and will work on that later.
My point in this message, is the history of Quantum Mechanics must start with 1900 and Max Planck on the concept of DISCRETE, we live in a Universe of discrete, not continuum. And the second major idea that defines Quantum Mechanics is this Dimension Shift.
In the NOVA show, I would say 75% of what was said is wrong wrong wrong.
Black Holes are for idiots of physics, physicists who have no logical marbles in their head. And lack an education in Logic to help them think straight and clear and correctly. If a mathematician were to teach that 1 = 1 and that 1 = 3, would be thrown out of math because he believes in Contradictions. On the other hand if a physicist says that the Pauli Exclusion Principle forbids atoms and elementary particles from squeezing together, but, then claims that mass can be squeezed together into black holes, never learned what it means to make a contradiction and is likely to be sought for to make a NOVA show on science. Modern day physicists who accept black holes are morons of logic, never learned that contradiction and science never mix.
The Quantum Entanglement part of this show was good, only the narrator should have mentioned John Bell and should have mentioned the fact that Entanglement has a better name--- called "Superdeterminism".
This show should never have mentioned Einstein, for Einstein was a 20th century failed scientist, especially when it comes to QM.
This NOVA show should have discussed the idea that the Greatest of all theories of Physics is the Atomic Theory, and mention Feynman's Lectures on Physics where he in fact says so in his first chapter--- Greatest theory of all science--- Atomic Theory.
Next, this show should have some logicians like AP appear and tell the audience, that when the greatest of all theories is the Atomic theory, means in a deductive argument, that the whole entire Universe has to be a single big atom such as plutonium, which fits all the special numbers of both math and physics. Why a Single Big Atom??? Because the Atomic theory would not be a theory that is universal but a mere rule. And a single big atom because we can say the Evolution of Atoms has to grow singularly from Hydrogen Atom Totality to Helium Atom Totality on up to Plutonium Atom Totality and then the next Atom Totality-- probably element 96 (perhaps 95, not sure).
Is there any evidence of Atom Totalities being Cosmology??? Of course, by late 1990s we start to see the galaxies forming a RING in Caltech's Jarrett mapping of the Cosmos. A Big Bang (I often call it the Big Dope) theory cannot have a cosmic structure. An Plutonium Atom Totality would need 94 x 840 =78,960 Cosmic Windings or Rings for the Cosmic Proton is a torus with the Cosmic Muons in a Faraday law-structure. That is the reason for the noticing of cosmic X-rays mentioned in the NOVA show, and not the stupid idiotic Hawking radiation b.s.
So, yes, I have to finish my logic textbooks before I get down to straightening out another NOVA fiasco that is 75%, at least 75% in total moronic error.
See you then.....
AP, King of Science
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